5770 to 7770 GHz Edition

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My main system is still (don't laugh) running an i5-750, at stock speed with 8GB of RAM.

I know with a little work I can o/c that baby quite well, just really never gotten around to it.

I am currently running a 1GB XFX 5770 on it, but have acquired a Sapphire 1GB 7770 GHz Edition card for nix.

I was toying with the idea of doing a straight swap to hopefully give me a little more fps in some older games (mostly titles from 2013 like Dead Space, Dirt 3, etc) but somewhere I read that the memory bus on the 7770 is not as wide as the 5770, and so there is little difference between the two cards.

From memory, IIRC, the XFX is running at 850MHz.

Is it worth doing the swap, or am I just flogging a dead horse with a CPU/MOBO from 2009?

I seem to remember the HD5770 was somewhat revered in that it gave performance around that of high-end cards only a generation or two older.

Bus bandwidth - yep, it's usually the case a skinner pipe will mean lower performance but generally when you're talking a couple of generations difference the core and memory speed will be sped up somewhat.

But those are just 3 variables of many, you've also got stuff like how many processing units the GPU has. Bottom line though is you need to do synthetic bench comparos and real life gaming with both.

I'd give it a shot, given you have the card there's not much to lose. Even if it's on-par for performance the chance is it'll use less power and be cooler.

A good idea is to do benchmark comparisons before and after. A couple of the 3DMarks and Furmark should be enough.

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I had been toying with the idea of dropping an R9 card in (380X or 390) as I can carry that over to my new rig once I get the $$ to do a new build.

Did some synthetic tests this morning, Furmark and Futuremark.

I just used the last Catalyst drivers available for the 5770 so I was comparing apples to apples, I didn't mess with the system upgrading to the new Crimson drivers for the 7770, it would be interesting to see if that improves performance, but for now I'll leave it be.

Furmark showed the 5770 as a much better performer in that test, albeit running a little warmer, but the Futuremark test was the complete opposite.

Fire Strike was not playable by any means, with 16fps being the best of either card.

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Pretty much everything I had thought. Just couldn't be arsed running Futuremark (getting old and impatient these days) and tbh, this rig is still playing pretty much everything a-ok.

Guess I'll have to exert a little elbow grease and do that swap ...

Also, go into the Catalyst Control Centre, and max out the 3 Overdrive sliders.

Allow +20% voltage.

Allow Max GPU MHZ overclock.

Allow Max Memory Overclock.

The new CCC doesn't apply the overclock unless the current speeds approach 90% load.

And I've seen very, very, very few cards that can't handle the maximum CCC overclocks. They're very mild.

I've occasionally limited voltage to +10%, and only upped the memory by 50% of the slider, but the GPU speed always maxes out in my experience, regardless of card. They (those sliders) are 'tailored' by model as to how much difference they make.